Daily Santorum: Digging the past

Since Iowa, Rick Santorum has been getting the media attention he's long craved, but that's not always a good thing.

The NYT ran a tough piece tracing the flow of earmarks out of his Senate office (and the inflow of related campaign donations). The WashPost has another looking critically at his "Operation Good Neighbor" charity. Less than 40% of what it raised went to the poor:

But homeless families and troubled children were not the biggest beneficiaries of Operation Good Neighbor. Instead, the foundation spent most of its money to run itself, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for fundraising, administration and office rental paid to Santorum’s political allies.

The most brutal piece, though, concerns Karen Santorum's past in Pittsburgh. Before she met the senator (and wrote a book and gave speeches about her devout Catholicism), she had a 6-year, live-in relationship with a doctor 40 years her senior, Tom Allen, who was and is a liberal, pro-choice activist. From Nancy Haas at the Daily Beast:

“Karen was a lovely girl, very intelligent and sweet,” says Allen, who at 92 uses a walker but retains a sly smile. A wine aficionado who frequented the Pittsburgh Symphony and was active in the local chapter of the ACLU, he lives with his wife of 16 years, Judi—they started dating in 1989, soon after he and Garver split—in the same large detached row house where he lived with the woman who would become Santorum’s wife. He and Garver also lived for several years in another house a few blocks away. “Karen had no problems with what I did for a living,” says Allen, who helped start one of the first hospital-sanctioned abortion clinics in Pennsylvania. “We never really discussed it.” (The Santorum campaign did not return repeated requests for comment on the relationship.)

Back in South Carolina, Santorum is feeling the heat from criticisms from his GOP foes, many of them in ads airing across the state. He held a press conference this morning saying Mitt Romney and Ron Paul were lying about his record, and promising to attack them in return.

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